China to complete multi-million dollar Namibia port project by 2017

China Harbour Engineering Company (CHEC), which is working on the container terminal at Walvis Bay in Namibia, said that the project can be completed by 2017.

The Chinese company won the contract to extend the NAD3 billion (USD250 million) bulk container terminal by reclaiming land from the Atlantic Ocean.

The project aims to extend the harbour by 600 meters to the current 1,500 meters so that the terminal will be able to handle 650,000 teu per year, nearly double from the current 350,000 teu per year.

The reclamation is scheduled to be done by February 2016, while the quay walls should be up by April 2016, and four months later the revetment should be completed.

Both CHEC and Namport officials told the media last Tuesday that they are confident the job would be done within the scheduled time.

The project is expected to improve services until 2020 when further extension can be made, according to Namport port engineer Elzevir Gelderbloem. “It took us nine years to get to the construction phase,” he said, “Such projects take time to implement and we hope our next projects will be much quicker.”

Namibia is now home to more than 40 Chinese companies that are making about USD4.6 billion per year, said Chinese Ambassador to Namibia Xin Shunkang, more than 6,000 Namibians are employed by those companies.

In 2011 and 2012, Chinese investments in Namibia grew by USD179 million, while that number rose to USD3.9 billion by the end of 2013. Most of the investments are concentrated in the mining and manufacturing sectors.